Superman Through the Ages

This started off as a project to gather up odds and ends, mostly pre-Crisis reprints and issues that didn’t fit into the post-Crisis chronology. Eventually, I ended up curating those issues into a historical record of Superman, up to the point in which it was bound in 2014.

The title page was the cover image from Action Comics #1 with “Superman Through the Ages” replacing the Action logo.

Special features:
-Supermen of America ad from Superman #1 printed on a single page (scanned from Millennium Edition, due to middle text being lost in the gutter)
-two page spread of early Superman memorabilia scanned from the 1988 Overstreet comic guide.

The Silver Age (1956-1970)Title page: image of Superman with Krypto, with small reproduction of Superman Annual #7 in corner.

The Bronze Age (1970-1986)
Title page: promo art from the Kryptonite Nevermore hardcover

-Superman: RetroActive 1970′s (includes reprint of Action Comics #484)-insert page: Action #484 cover on front, image of faces drawn by Curt Swan on the back-Superman #400-insert page: Perez/Ross Crisis on Infinite Earths cover painting/Brian Bolland art for Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow
-Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (90′s trade reprinting Superman #423 and Action Comics #483, including the summaries of both series up to that point)

The Post-Crisis era (1986-2011)Title page: background with a collage of various post-Crisis comics, with Byrne art and the cover to Man of Steel #1 (back is cover painting from Superman: Man of Steel #1 by Bogdanove)

Notes:
-Superman #1 contains the stories from Action Comics #1-4, so it was a better option for this book. Action Comics #1 has other features and the Superman story ends on a cliffhanger.
-The post-Crisis section is not chronological by publication, but by story. Action Comic #800 and the two annuals each expand on the first three issues of Byrne’s MOS, but do not neatly splice into those stories. I added the Secret Files to showcase the electric blue Superman, and because it would not work with any of the main volumes due to pacing.
-I did not include the 1980′s RetroActive special because it focused too much on the post-Crisis era, and I had enough material for that.
-The Superman Special from 1992 by Walt Simonson was included mainly because I had already bound the books that went around it in the main Superman collection. But it fits here, since it was a retelling of an earlier story.
-I glued in one of those small pockets that libraries used for check out cards (back in the day) to the inside back cover. That’s where I store the 3-D glasses.
-If I had done this book in 2018 or later, the majority of Action Comics #1000 would have been included. However, I might have excluded Action Comics #252, 484, and 800, as they appeared in the 80 Years of Superman hardcover.
-I wanted to include a few other key moments, like Superboy #1, but couldn’t find a decent reprint or even image. At a certain point, I had to cap the book since it had started as a place for odds and ends.